#meta fantasy

Truly thrilled to unleash the cover of All Hail Chaos. 

Publishing 12 May 2026, dive into the wicked, unmissable sequel to the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling Long Live Evil.

Here for Part 1.

The Conjunction of Spheres trapped elves and other fantastic beings in The Witcher's historical time. Before it, legendary, pre-rational elves moved freely between story-worlds. Ciri's Elder Blood preserves this power. And Ithlinne's prophecy is the elves' map back into eternity.

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Vorgeschichte of the Elves

Mythic Time and Historical Time function as distinct ontological modes of being in The Witcher, and it is Mythic Time from which everything flows and in which everything is preserved. It provides the archetypal template that, despite being subject to repeat euhemerization in our meta fantasy, is worth imitating and recovering by ‘re-entering’ it. But how? What kind of consciousness can move between these registers? Why, the kind that is able ‘to tear apart the rigid corset called rational cognition’ that restricts modernist-rationalist thinking.

It is for a reason Elder Blood is the Blood of Elves – elves who, for Tolkien, were the quintessence of Faërie. Fairy Tale and myth. Allegedly too, the title ‘The Witcher’ was given by the publisher out of marketing considerations, while Sapkowski had intended to call the pentateuch ‘Krew elfów’, Blood of Elves (with the first volume ’Lwiatko’, or The Lion Cub).

‘The legacy of remarkable blood is concentrated in [Ciri]. Hen Ichaer, the Elder Blood. Genetic material determining the carrier’s uncommon abilities. Determining the great role she will play. That she must play.’ ‘Because that is what elven legends, myths and prophecies demand?’ Sabrina Glevissig asked with a sneer. ‘Since the very beginning, this whole matter has smacked of fairy-tales and fantasies! Now I have no doubts. My dear ladies, I suggest we discuss something important, rational and real for a change.’ ‘I bow before sober rationality; the power and source of your race’s great superiority,’ Ida Emean said, smiling faintly. ‘Nonetheless, here, in the company of individuals capable of using a power which does not always lend itself to rational analysis or explanations, it seems somewhat improper to disregard the elves’ prophecies. Neither our race nor our power draws its strength from rationality. In spite of that it has endured for tens of thousands of years.’ —Baptism of Fire

As a culture, elves show pre-rational modes of being and thinking. Through their ecologism, (near) immortality, and presence ‘before other things,’ they traditionally embody the cyclical perspective in Fantasy. Their wisest may grasp what that means in terms of story-structure, which is textually supported by the way Auberon and Avallac’h talk about destiny, eternity, and Ciri’s role. Divining the fate of worlds and characters as if it was a plot in a book of books, there is nothing unreal for elves in adjusting their behaviour according to the recurrence of seasons and narratives; the veracity of these cyclical things holds power in itself. (Know your classics!) What for Sabrina is an epistemic divide seems to be an ontological difference for Ida. Through their cultural practices and relationship to time, elves function as pre-rational mythic consciousness incarnate. They are story-bound, an inherently magical and fantastic race, and, hence, anti-historical. From human perspective, call them Eliade’s ‘archaic man.’

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A cognitive shift took place when oral traditions were bound in the written word. Words, uttered and embodied, lost their magical power as events, acts of imagination that returned and recurred eternally as moments that you could enter. By contrast, the written down text is static, proceeding linearly, besieged by the demand of consistency and coherence in its structure. There are tricks for making it more complicated, but that is one of its main constraints. The Alder King cannot be simultaneously 600 and 1500+ years old – the laws of time dilation must apply! Auberon not Oberon – name is just a referent not essence! Pre-rational thought, by contrast, involves fluid, living mythology; a permanent grasping of infinite possibility. Both/and not either/or. To write down any story means to fix that story in its time; the author, the magician sub-creator, binds his creation with the written Word. When the imagined element is put down, it dies, losing its ability to continue growing and shapeshifting at least within the confines of that tale. The Elder Races ‘fade’ in history; that is, they are – non-euphemistically and historically – killed off.

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Before Andrzej Sapkowski began his act of binding, there were only spiralling mists and dreams. Honouring storytelling’s cyclicality, the author inserts the cyclical nature of time to the very genesis of his Never-Neverland. The catastrophe that sets the stage of the world in The Witcher is a migration that happens over and over again. Each time a new culture arrives, the tribe who receives them enters a time of upheaval and change which leads to a sense of a loss of paradise that existed before the entry of Other, different minds into their lives.

…a drama acted out by the Ancestors of men and by Supernatural Beings different in type from the all-powerful, immortal Creator Gods. These Divine Beings are subject to changes in modality; they "die" and become something else, but this "death" is not an annihilation, they do not perish once and for all, but survive in their creations. Nor is this all. For their death at the hands of the mythical Ancestors changed not only their mode of being but the mode of being of mankind. From the time of the primordial murder an indissoluble relation arose between Divine Beings of the dema type and men. Between them at present there is a sort of "communion": man feeds on the God and, when he dies, joins him again in the realm of the dead. —Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality

Nevertheless, in mythic consciousness no end is seen as final. Elves do not vanish without a trace, they become, for example, the Wild Hunt – existing in an altered modality as humans ‘inherit’ elven lands and language, consuming their civilization. ‘It was the end of one… race, followed by the appearance of another’ (Eliade, p. 54). They are neither dead nor alive in Myth. Euhemerized, these are the elves who ‘left for a more interesting reality.’ But as migration forms the Ur-Myth of this storyworld, nothing new happens without being a repetition of the same archetypal pattern. Elves are what humans will one day become – when they are in turn displaced, mythologized, and transformed into the next iteration of fairy tales. They will ‘go away’ in one form to survive in another. History’s progression (to the end of the Plot) inevitably ends in an act of blending – into the substrate of all Fantasy.

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In any good fantasy there must always be elves or elf-like entities. It’s a classic!

‘And so shall begin the extinction of the world. Do your recall Ithlinne’s text, Witcher? Who is far shall die at once; who is near shall fall from the sword; who hides shall die of hunger, who survives shall perish from the frost… For Tedd Deireadh, the Time of the End, the Time of the Sword and the Battle Axe, the Time of Contempt, the Time of the White Cold and the Wolfish Snowstorm shall come…’ ‘Poetry.’ ‘Do you prefer it less poetic? As a result of a change in the angle of the sun’s rays, the margin of permafrost will shift–significantly. Then the mountains will be crushed and pushed back southwards by the ice sliding from the North. Everything will be buried under snow. Under a thick layer more than a mile deep. And it will become very–very–cold.’ —The Tower of the Swallow

Famously, Sapkowski has claimed that a book is just a gathering of letters (ink on a page is what Geralt truly looks like) and when the legend runs its course the letters, like stick figurines, are buried by the blank white page – ‘people calling for help. At the bottom, deep beneath the ice … is a frozen world.’ Until the thaw of a new spring. Until the beginning of a new tale.

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From the ink came the first word, the first thing to be.

Then, the sentence was unraveled from around God’s finger.

Paragraphs screaming in elongated and prolonged agony. Chapters crawling towards their inevitable ending.

Books of life. Sequels to life.

Existence is a story series.

The first thing they teach you is this: never, under any circumstances, remove your mask. It’s not a big deal if you take off your gloves, although it isn’t really encouraged. Inklish can still get under your fingernails.

And if you know anything about inklish, you understand how hard it is to wash off.

But if you inhale it? Forget about your future. Make peace with your loved ones. It’ll cluster within seconds of entering your lungs.

You won’t be able to breathe. The corrupted flesh will be shredded by every panicked gasp. You’ll exhale the pieces through your nose and mouth, along with an ocean’s worth of blood. It’s very painful.

People have gone crazy from the suffering. They’d killed themselves.

I know what you must be thinking, dear reader. How horrible! Why don’t they just burn the stuff, and prevent anyone from being exposed to such a dangerous biohazard?!

Well, they tried that.

When the inklish first started to appear, the CDC was given full authority of affected sites. Nobody knew what was happening. Officials thought it appropriate to treat the phenomenon as a virus. The agency proceeded to quarantine libraries that were suffering from shedding and decided, in its infinite wisdom, that clean-up crews could use flamethrowers. A lapse in judgement. Maybe.

It didn’t work out. The inklish was burned, don’t get me wrong. The strips and flaps were destroyed. Shelves were cleaned, their edges smoothed.

But the material itself wasn’t gone. It’d been reduced. Made smaller. Now, instead of being in piles large enough to see and contain, it’d been transformed into a fine powder. In this state, it could easily pass through the air ventilation system in their suits.

And the walls. And the floor.

The disaster that followed would lead to a change in how the government would handle future shredding. Everyone was so mad that protests lasted for weeks. The CDC found itself in quite the legal trouble.

It hadn’t been prepared. It didn’t know how to proceed. Someone had to be trained to deal with this emergency.

The MCRD was founded in the resulting fallout.

I’m terrified of books.

Any kind of book, really. It could be a novel or a story collection. Manga or comics or dictionaries. Whenever I see one, I get the chills and have to plug my ears to stop the voices.

Yes. You read that right.

Voices sometimes bleed from the pages, reciting whatever it is that’s written inside. I can tell them apart. They say things a certain way. Some giggle. Others growl and curse in anger. But most of them just whisper slowly, like they’re afraid.

Which is way weirder than talking books. I’m the one who’s supposed to be scared. Not the monsters.

But what could’ve scared them so much?

Fire?

A paper shredder?